Air

Paul, a Swiss interior designer living alone in the remote Orkney Islands, receives an unusual commission from Kuki, a prestigious design magazine: travel to a massive data center in Norway and coat its cavernous interior in the “perfect white.” But after a solar storm disrupts the facility, Paul mysteriously vanishes into space and time.

Ildr, a young girl living in another realm, mistakes an oddly dressed stranger for a deer and shoots him with an arrow. Nursing the stranger back to health, she begins to suspect he is not of her world. Soon, the two are fleeing the Duke of Tviot’s murderous soldiers through a myth-haunted landscape, heading toward a subterranean city carved into a cliff above the Frozen Sea—a place rumored to lie beyond the duke’s reach.

Air is Christian Kracht’s most seductively disorienting work yet: a haunting journey through a world that may be a dream, the afterlife, or reality’s inverted twin.